Senses of Cinema: 20 Years of The Filmmakers’ Co-Operatives, dir. John Hughes and Tom Zubrycki (2023)
John Hughes and Tom Zubrycki’s documentary Senses of Cinema tells the story of two film co-operatives, the epicentres of underground filmmaking in Sydney and Melbourne during the 1970s and 80s. Told through interviews with original co-op members intercut with clips taken from key films, Senses of Cinema charts the story of their rise and fall.
Having missed the film’s premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2022, I was happy to see it screened as part of the year-round programming of the Castlemaine Documentary Festival, and it seemed fitting to experience a film about Australia’s underground film co-operatives in the kind of environment those films would have originally screened in alongside audience members who remembered attending co-op screenings.
The Sydney Filmmakers Co-op formed around a group of filmmakers known as Ubu Films who were producing experimental and avant-garde short films in the late 1960s, including Albie Thom’s Bluto (1967), Aggy Read’s Boobs a Lot (1968), and David Perry’s A Sketch on Abigail’s Belly (1968). Originally founded as a way to distribute the Ubu films, the co-op started running screenings on the top floor of the Third World Bookshop in the early 1970s. Before long screenings were taking place all over Australia, and in turn inspired the setting-up of the Melbourne Filmmakers Co-op.
As filmmaker and producer Jan Chapman says in the film, ‘It was a time where you felt you could change things … when anything was possible’. Many of the films made at the co-ops reflect the left-wing politics of the early 1970s, with the experimentalism of the Ubu films giving way to more explicitly political documentary works focusing on feminism and Indigenous rights and gay and lesbian rights. Films such as Jeni Thornley’s Maidens (1978), which uses home movie film and stills to investigate and deconstruct the notion of family, and Margot Nash and Robin Laurie’s We Aim to Please (1976), which dissects the sexuality of women and their representation in the media, show the stylistic breadth of feminist filmmaking during this period. The films of Alessandro Cavadini, such as Ningla A’na (1972), which explores the beginnings of the Tent Embassy, were among a growing number of films about Indigenous issues and Blak Australia which led to the formation of the Black Film Unit within the co-op. Similarly, Digby Duncan credits the Sydney co-op with playing a crucial role in the establishment of gay and lesbian film culture in Sydney. Duncan helped establish the One in Seven Collective at the co-op, which produced Witches and Faggots, Dykes and Poofters (1979), a film which examines Mardi Gras and gay oppression in Sydney.
Films produced by both co-ops had their struggles with censors, first with Kit Guyett’s Phallic Forest (1970)—the title being something of a giveaway—and later with Stirring (1974) by Jane Oehr, commissioned by Film Australia but slapped with a suppression order by the Education Department due to its depiction and discussion of corporal punishment in schools. Interestingly, Stirring also touches on discussions around internal censorship, namely a motion at the Sydney co-op that was put forward to try and stop films with pornographic content from screening. This motion was voted down after a passionate defence by Albie Thoms, who stated that the co-op should screen any and all films presented for screening without bias or interference. Thoms’s insistence that the co-op shouldn’t be political seems out of step with the films being produced at the time; as filmmaker Susan Lambert puts it, ‘We lived politics, and we were going to change the world’. Later, filmmaker Stephen Wallace states that the women’s movement and feminist filmmakers started to control the co-op and eventually Albie Thoms left the Sydney co-op altogether.
As a present-day filmmaker working in the underground film scene in Melbourne, the ins and outs of working within a co-operative are the elements of Senses of Cinema that fascinate me the most. Familiar disagreements and power struggles that result from working within the structure of a co-operative group are well documented in the film, particularly in the case of Sydney co-op, with the ‘long meetings which would go on forever’ described by filmmaker Helen Grace as a kind of ‘excess of democracy’. At the same time, it is clear from the interviewees’ comments that the co-ops were an immensely formative environment for burgeoning filmmakers to discover all aspects of filmmaking, from working the camera to producing and directing, and finally to the distribution process; Jan Chapman recollects that director Philip Noyce claimed he learnt more about advertising and distributing films from his time with the Sydney co-op than from Hollywood. Similarly, it is clear that the sense of idealism and optimism present in the 1970s leftist political movements is imbued in the films being made at the time, with the co-ops at the centre for the filmmakers.
Both the Melbourne and the Sydney co-ops ended with the cutting of their funding by the Australian Film Commission, in 1977 and 1985 respectively. Though not mentioned in the film, funding bodies such as the Experimental Film Fund (EFF) and the Women’s Film Fund (WFF), established in 1970 and 1975 respectively, were available to independent filmmakers during this period, with the EFF in operation until 1978 and the WFF winding up in the 90s. The combination of the Australian Film Commission actively funding independent works and the spirit of collectivism and support in the Melbourne and Sydney co-ops produced an incredible array of important and interesting films over a fairly short space of time, helping to foster the careers of fiction and documentary filmmakers, in addition to certain actors who are now household names, as well as supporting key political and social movements of the time. As filmmaker Margot Nash says, ‘Before the co-op people just thought, “No one wants to see these films”, and what the co-op really proved, was that they did’.
Senses of Cinema took ten years to make, with funding coming in fits and starts. Initial interviews with the filmmakers were conducted in 2011—fortuitously, as it happens, given the death of key experimental filmmaker Albie Thoms in 2012. Hughes credits the 2020 COVID lockdowns in Melbourne with providing the final push to piece the film together, crossing town to work on the edit, as filmmaking was one of the many legitimate exemptions from total lockdown during that period. At the Q & A after the screening in Castlemaine, Hughes said that watching the film now, he can see only the films omitted from the story of the co-ops, such as Dalmas (1973) by Bert Deling. Despite any potential omissions, however, Senses of Cinema presents a startling number of films and a loving portrait of a vibrant and active filmmaking culture in Sydney and Melbourne during the 1970s and 80s.
Film collectives remain part of Australia’s arts ecology, with groups such as Artist Film Workshop in Melbourne, of which I am a long-time member, and the Workshop for Potential Cinema in Sydney having operated for many years. In my experience, there is nothing so inspiring as watching your friends and film-comrades making great work, and much of the experience of filmmakers documented in Senses of Cinema is echoed in these contemporary environments—namely the sense of collectivism, the constant exposure to other films and filmmakers, and the at times challenging nature of arriving at collective decisions democratically. However, the differences between new and old environments are notable, and at times poignant. Most obviously, funding opportunities for experimental filmmakers have been drastically reduced, to the point of being non-existent, and the idea of having access to both an Experimental Film Fund and a Women’s Film Fund seems unimaginable today. The paucity of funding not only impacts the scope of the works being produced but also the way collectives operate. Generally speaking, they are now smaller, more modest outfits, although possibly more resilient, as they were never conceived of as being reliant on external support.
Another profound difference lies in the types of films being made, and is perhaps reflective of contemporary politics more broadly. Political intent is certainly more diluted in today’s independent film environment, and the activism and sense of urgency captured in Senses of Cinema is now the exception rather than the norm. Additionally, the ease of filmmaking today, when every phone and computer has filming/editing software built in, means aspiring filmmakers don’t need to rely on the collective environment, instead leaning more towards working alone.
Hughes and Zubrycki were both involved in the Sydney and Melbourne co-ops, and Senses of Cinema is imbued with their respect, admiration and fondness for the filmmakers, the films and the co-ops themselves. Although Senses of Cinema is a celebration of the people and the works made, I can’t help but be aware that with the demise of the co-ops something important was lost in the Australian film scene, and that we’re all poorer for it.